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Hall of shame: Horton St. mostly gone sidewalk

Today’s is the result of another to-do list failure. I had this in my notes: “East side near end of Horton – 1924? DPW (may need to be wet).” Being wet sometimes makes faded marks a little more legible. Yesterday the weather got significantly above freezing for the first time in a long time, so I thought it might be my chance. I walked up there and found that the sidewalk was wet, all right. In fact, the stretch of sidewalk near the end of Horton was under an inch of water. There would be no finding the stamp under that.

Walking back from there on Horton Street, I saw what looked like a grassy square with no sidewalk at all, which didn’t make sense. I stopped to look and realized it did have the remnants of a sidewalk, but it’s more than half gone. It has to have taken some time to let it get this bad. I am (a little) surprised the city will let sidewalks get this bad before requiring them to be replaced. This one gets entered into the Hall of Shame as maybe the worst sidewalk block on the east side. It’s on the east side of Horton between Michigan and Jerome.

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Regent St., O & M, undated

The weather recently hasn’t been very conducive to hunting sidewalk stamps, so all I can do is show you something pretty. This O & M (city Operations & Maintenance) stamp is one you’ve seen before. In fact, it’s the first stamp ever featured in this blog. But this time it’s got a light dusting of snow in it, left behind after the sidewalk was cleared, and I just love how that looks.

It’s on the east side of Regent Street’s 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.

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N. Clemens Ave., Neenah Foundry Co. water cover

This utility cover is set into the east side of North Clemens Avenue between Michigan and Jerome, near the entrance to the parking lot that runs behind the Green Door bar and other businesses on that block. There is a hole through the company name, but it is the Neenah Foundry Co. of Neenah, Wisconsin.

Neenah Foundry is still in business, though these days they are part of a larger company known as NEI (Neenah Enterprises, Inc.). I’m disappointed that their Web site doesn’t have a company history on it, which is always what I hope for. It does say that they have “almost 150 years of experience” and that their “most recognizable products include manhole covers and frames, inlet frames and grates, tree grates, and cast-iron trench grates in roads and airport runways across America and internationally.”

Looking south toward Michigan. The back of Asian Gourmet and the Green Door can be seen past the parking lot.

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Marcus St., Cantu & Sons, 1988

This stamp, from the south side of Marcus Street between Clemens and Fairview, is a typical example of a Cantu & Sons stamp with the 1987 date corrected to 1988. There are a lot of ones like that around the neighborhood. The real reason I photographed it, though, was the odd graffiti, added as though an addendum to the contractor stamp: “The Butterfly.”

There is something else scrawled in the corner to the left, but I wasn’t able to make it out in the current light.

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Mifflin Ave., Ghost Stairs

No sidewalk for you today; in fact there is no sidewalk at all on this block, Mifflin Avenue between Kalamazoo and Marcus. Instead, here is a little relic that always makes me a bit sad: the stairs to a long-gone house. (I’m not sure how long gone, but it was already gone by the earliest Google street views in 2007.)

There is only one house remaining on this (west) side of the block, and that one is so obscured by tree cover that it is hard to see. There are a few more houses on the other side, but like much of the Urbandale neighborhood, this is a sparsely-occupied block, and one that is likely to continue depopulating.

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Elizabeth St., survey monument

I must have passed this disc, in the sidewalk on the north side of Elizabeth Street between Regent and Clemens, hundreds of times, and yet I’d never noticed it before. For some reason I stopped to look at it this time, thinking it was a groundwater well cover. To my surprise, it is something cooler (at least if you have my temperament): a survey monument, specifically a benchmark.

I don’t know much about survey monuments, but this one seems plainer and less informative than ones I have stumbled on elsewhere. I wonder what is hidden beneath the lid? It appears to be open up if a screw is removed. I also don’t know what the code on the rim means.

The marker is just at the edge of the snow-covered area closest to the viewer in this photo.

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Allen St., McNeilly Const., 1980

Here’s a glamour shot for you. You’ve seen the J. Carter stamp before. The McNeilly stamp hasn’t appeared here before, though others just like it from this vicinity have. But the real reason I wanted this photo is that it just looks so aesthetic when a dusting of snow puddles inside the letters of a contractor stamp. They’re such wonderful little artifacts in all seasons.

You can also see my boot print on the left, revealing the cleats I have to strap on to avoid wiping out on ice.

This is from the east side of Allen Street between Kalamazoo and Marcus, next to the Neogen building.

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Geometric Markings, Jerome St.

Merry Christmas, dear readers, all two or three of you! Today I thought I would share something simple but puzzling. I have noticed these marks on the sidewalk in front of the big old Tudor house on Jerome Street. No, not this one, the other big old Tudor house on Jerome Street, on the northwest corner of Jerome and Horton. There are three of these geometric marks on the sidewalk in front of that house, and I don’t know what they are.

I think I have noticed markings like this in one other place on the east side (in the Prospect Place neighborhood, if I remember correctly). They seem too utilitarian and asymmetric to be purely decorative, but then, what do they do? If anyone knows or has a guess I would be interested to hear it.

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Leslie St., C. Fletcher, 1962

These handwritten stamps are a little way up the street from the handwritten C.H. Peel, but in this case I can be quite confident they are contractor’s marks from the fact that there are two of them paired on either end of a stretch of sidewalk, as a contractor would do to mark the beginning and end of the work they were responsible for. This is on the west side of the 400 block of Leslie Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.

Sorry the photos are dark. I have been taking my walks at night lately to view Christmas lights, and also because it’s hard to take them during the day when the day is about ten minutes long.

In these (not very good) photos it is hard to tell that the first letter is a C, but I’ve seen it by daylight and know that it is. My usual tricks didn’t bring me any joy. I couldn’t find out anything at all about C. Fletcher.

Hard to read under the flash but there is another “C Fletcher” here on a block that has been patched to try to fix the tripping hazard. There are a lot of uneven sidewalk blocks on the east side, often with this kind of nearly useless fix applied.
The above mark is near the bottom of this photo, though not visible in the darkness.